‘Family’ Issues to Color Race for Presidency : Day Care, Medical Plans : Priorities for Both Parties

When Michael S. Dukakis conscripted his Academy Award-winning actress cousin, Olympia, to describe the family to the Democratic National Convention, and in his acceptance speech heralded the anticipated arrival of his first grandchild, a tremor of anxiety seized the Republican camp.

“We saw a good show there in terms of family,” Vice President George Bush said ruefully of the Democratic conclave, but the GOP’s nominee-to-be vowed to have his own progeny and grand-progeny on hand for the television cameras at the Republican National Convention here next week.

Son Marvin at 6-4

Bush said that when his son Marvin, who stands a towering 6 foot 4, was asked while playing horseshoes whether his family would beat the Dukakises at the game, Marvin said: “I don’t know, but we sure got the height advantage.”

“It isn’t the height advantage,” the vice president added, “it’s the depth.”

However light-hearted, such quips illustrate a serious aspect of this presidential campaign: Both parties and their candidates are going to great lengths to dramatize commitment to family issues, a broad range of concerns that has taken center stage in the struggle to win the White House.

Both Republicans and Democrats use the “family” rubric to cover a variety of social problems from drug abuse and education to child care and medical insurance, all of which touch directly on voters’ lives. Both Bush and Dukakis are attempting to address these issues while keeping faith with their parties’ ideological inclinations.

Just last month, for example, Bush unveiled a day-care plan that, instead of working through the federal bureaucracy, would rely mainly on a $1,000-per-child tax credit to low-income families that would allow parents to spend the money as they see fit. In keeping with the GOP’s interest in supporting the so-called traditional family, the household could get the tax credit even if one parent stayed home with the children.

Dukakis, by contrast, has backed the Act for Better Child Care sponsored by congressional Democrats, which would support child care for low-income and middle-income families through direct federal payments rather than a tax credit. That plan also would establish federal health and safety standards for child-care facilities.

One reason family issues are so prominent in 1988 is that they fill a vacuum in the political debate left by a relatively prosperous economy at home and a relatively peaceful world abroad.

Another reason for the emergence of family issues is the aging of the postwar baby boom generation, whose members, because of their numbers (and, some critics contend, their self-absorption) exert a potent political influence.

Population Growing Up

“When they were younger we were a nation of teen-agers,” said Joseph Piccione, a policy analyst with National Forum Foundation, a nonpartisan Washington think tank. “Now, we’re a nation of parents.”

The prominence of family issues also reflects profound changes in American life. One is the massive influx of women into the work force, which Bush, in unveiling his day-care program last month, called “the single most important demographic change in the second half of the 20th Century.”

“The age of full-family working has increased the need for child care,” said Rep. Jerry Lewis (R-Redlands), “so we are all in the business of figuring out how we can deliver it and not have it cost too much.” He is a co-chairman of the GOP platform committee, which will begin drafting the party’s quadrennial manifesto here today.

Another significant change is the increasing number of people who are elderly, a circumstance that is having a powerful, often poignant effect on their offspring.

These changes have had considerable direct impact on political thinking, as Paul Maslin, a Democratic pollster and a member of the baby boom generation, pointed out in highly personal terms at a breakfast with Washington reporters last week.

Concern for Old Age

“When you start to think about an issue like long-term health care and how it affects your parents, the concern is whether we (as a nation) are going to deal with that issue or not,” Maslin said.

“And, if we don’t, we’re going to have to pay for our parents, and we don’t know how we’re going to do that, being squeezed as badly as we are with housing costs skyrocketing and worrying about educating our kids.”

Neither party has a corner on this booming political market, but both believe dealing with family issues offers rich rewards.

Republican leaders see it as a way to demonstrate compassion and rebut criticism that their party is mainly concerned with protecting the interests of the rich and powerful.

“It’s important to our party and our country that we talk as Republicans about the proper role for government to play in assisting families,” said Nebraska Gov. Kay A. Orr, who chairs the GOP platform committee and promises that its product will be “definitive and vigorous, not vague,” on matters such as medical care and education programs.

Preview of Platform

The Republican platform is expected to provide the rhetorical basis for the family-related proposals that Bush already is pushing. Besides his tax-credit scheme for day care, Bush, who says he wants to be known as “the education President” is calling for a $600-million boost in federal education spending, much of it to go to schools serving disadvantaged children. He has also advocated a college savings-bond program that would mimic Individual Retirement Accounts.

Bush also has said that, as President, he will appoint a “drug czar” to coordinate drug law enforcement efforts, and he backs the establishment of a multinational strike force to battle “drug kingpins,” ideas he portrays as family protection measures. “Every child, every family, should have the opportunity to grow up in a safe and peaceful neighborhood,” he has said.

Among the Democrats, often accused of catering too much to the underclass and special interest groups, family issues are seen by some leaders as a critical opportunity to show that the party can put government to practical use on behalf of the middle class.

“The Democratic Party will be successful in recapturing the White House when it is successful in capturing the issue of family,” Michigan Gov. James J. Blanchard told the Democratic platform committee when it began work in June. The committee responded by producing a document that in its opening section pledged support for child care and also called for a “national health program” to coordinate federal services in that area.

Dukakis’ Favorite Theme

At the convention in Atlanta last month, Dukakis sought to lay claim to the family issue in his acceptance speech, recalling his own experience as the child of immigrants and stressing his own relationships. He bragged about his “wonderful wife and four terrific children” and exulted in the “little baby” his son, Jon, and daughter-in-law, Lisa, expect in January as a portent of “wonderful new beginnings.”

On the stump, the family theme pervades nearly all of Dukakis’ speeches, and he seeks to tie virtually all family issues, from day care to education, to his favorite motto, “good jobs with good wages.”

“The best family policy is something called full employment,” is another Dukakis refrain.

The governor often cites accomplishments in Massachusetts as examples of what he would try to do as President in the way of family assistance. On health care, for example, he points to a Massachusetts law, passed last spring, that guarantees all state residents medical coverage. Dukakis pledges that, as chief executive, he would “make good--as my state has--on Harry Truman’s commitment to basic health insurance for every American family.”

On education, Dukakis has made one of his few specific new spending proposals, a $250-million Fund for Teaching Excellence to support teacher training programs.

The relatively modest size of this proposed expenditure reflects Dukakis’ concern that in their eagerness to serve the family the Democrats must not again be tagged as the party of big spenders and high taxes.

Thus, though he has endorsed “in concept” the Better Child Care legislation being promoted by Democrats in Congress, Dukakis repeatedly has said that federal budget constraints would not allow spending of the entire $2.5 billion contemplated in the measure.

Reagan Rhetoric Recalled

The family as a substantive political concern first came to the fore in 1980, when Ronald Reagan, challenging President Jimmy Carter, used the theme in response to what policy analyst Piccione calls the “cultural unraveling” touched off by the social turmoil of the 1960s and 1970s.

Because of his emphasis on the family, Piccione contends, Reagan was viewed as standing for “the restoration of traditional family and social values,” a perception he says was “timed right for a society that was ready to recover them.”

Beyond this symbolic significance, the family theme was seen by many of Reagan’s supporters as a commitment to conservative goals such as reversing the Supreme Court rulings on abortion laws and prayer in public schools.

But the Reagan Administration was unable to accomplish these ends and, meanwhile, the mood of the country gradually has changed. As memories of the pre-Reagan unrest faded and as new social and economic problems arose, the public began to view the family less as a bulwark against change and more as an institution in need of help.

This created an opportunity for the Democrats, who found “family issues” a more politically acceptable term for objectives they had previously referred to as women’s issues, children’s issues or aid to the poor.

Now Middle-Class Aid

Liberals saw the economic and social pressures on the middle class in the 1980s as a way to help build support for programs that had fallen into disfavor when they were regarded mainly as aid to the underprivileged.

“It’s very important to face the fact that while we are deeply concerned with 13 million poor children, there are tens of millions more moderate-income families who are child-care poor and housing poor and health-insurance poor,” said Marion Wright Edelman, president of the nonpartisan Children’s Defense Fund, which is closely identified with liberal social-welfare causes.

In seeking to take advantage of the new political outlook on family issues, Democrats have the advantage of an agenda of federal inaction on social problems built up during the Reagan years. They also can claim know-how gained at the state level, where they say their ability to deal with problems similar to family issues has helped them elect governors where they have not even come close to winning in presidential elections.

“This (family) agenda is a Democratic issue,” said Democratic pollster Maslin. “It’s like a very big gubernatorial issue. The whole question of family has moved beyond central moral questions, which were the Republican definition, to things like education and health care.”

Indeed, some Republicans acknowledge that their party operates under a handicap in trying to find ways to use government to deal with family issues. “There is still a sizeable number of Republicans who think that government is at best a necessary evil,” said Marty Connors, executive director of the Southern Republican Exchange, a party-building organization backed by Southern GOP governors. “If you talk about problem-solving with government, Republicans are not viewed by many voters as the best party to do it.”

Yet whatever edge the Democrats may enjoy with the family issues, Bush’s strategists argue that this ground is too important to be abandoned to the opposition.

“Child care is an issue that doesn’t belong to one party,” Bush campaign Press Secretary Sheila Tate said. “When 65% of the women in this country work because they have to, child care is a real concern to families--not just to women, to families.

“That is one of the social issues of the day. It doesn’t belong to the Democrats, and, rhetorically, we’re not going to let them own it.”

Staff writers Cathleen Decker and David Lauter contributed to this story.